How-To Geek

Keen to try out Windows 8, but aren’t quite ready to give up on Windows 7 just yet? Follow this fun easy guide to get the best of both worlds.

The ability to pin websites to your Start Screen is a nice touch in Windows 8, however by default the sites you pin open with the Metro version of Internet Explorer. Here’s how to change that.

Windows 8 has a new Start Screen, but there’s no Start Button anymore–and that might be too much for some people to deal with. Here’s how to get a Start button that opens up the new Metro-style Start menu.

Forgetting your password can be very frustrating, however this situation could be completely alleviated if you always had a password reset disk handy. Lets see how we can create one in Windows 8.

When you download a script off the internet and try to run it, if you have not previously configured PowerShell, it will throw a nasty error in red font. This is enough to scare most users off, but there is an easy fix.

One of the most common steps when troubleshooting a PC is to boot into safe mode. For a long time this has been achieved by pressing the F8 key, this all changes with Windows 8 and its Automatic Repair mode. But what if we want Safe Mode?

When you email someone a copy of your document or presentation and they don’t have a font installed, the font reverts to default. This can mess up the whole layout, and can be fixed by embedding fonts into your documents.

Have you ever sent private information to someone, maybe a family member needed your credit card number, and then regretted that you had ever done it. This can all be solved with a self-destructing link.

By default the Start Menu will automatically arrange your installed programs alphabetically, while this may be the behavior you desire, I know a lot of people who are irritated by it. Here’s how to disable it.

Every time you open a Microsoft Office application, you have to wait for the splash screen to disappear. If you want this to go away, here’s how you can disable the startup screen.

Since our home servers are constantly on, and often headless, it is nice to know when certain events happen on your server without having to log in and check all the time. This is where email notifications save the day.

We all have had a time when we have done some private browsing, maybe for someone’s birthday present, on the internet without going into “private” mode. Here’s the beginner’s guide to clearing your web history in any of the major browsers.

It’s important to note that this will not actually conceal your data from somebody that knows what they are doing.

Last year Google added the ability to plot graphs, which allows you to plot mathematical functions right on the Google search result page. Here’s how to make the Batman logo.

When you have lots and lots of tabs open, it’s extremely annoying to suddenly hear a background tab playing some loud noise or music, and then you have to hunt down the right tab to close. Here’s a great Chrome extension that gives you better control.

Almost anyone knows how to make a “hidden” folder in Windows, but then again almost anyone knows how to make explorer show hidden folders. Let’s take a look at how to make a folder so hidden, only you will know its there.

Ever had to wait for a download to finish and wished that you could play a game of Tetris? Even if you have never been in that situation, you can use this trick to increase your geek cred the next time your friends come over.

One of Microsoft’s leading technologies that protect us from the dangerous web is the SmartScreen filter in Internet Explorer. Since the filter is crowd-sourced, it helps tremendously if you do your part, so let’s take a look at how to report a malicious website.

Once you have Hyper-V installed the first thing you are going to want to do is start creating virtual machines. The process is mostly a next, next, finish matter, but just incase you are unsure, here’s a quick start-to-finish guide.

Did you know that you can find out which operating system a networked device is running just by looking at the way it communicates on the network? Let’s take a look at how we can discover what operating system our devices are running.

Windows Server 2008 R2 and later releases of the product ship with a virtualization platform called Hyper-V, which works quite well since it’s built into Windows. Today we’re going to show you how to install it.

There is no option in Word 2010 that allows you to use a different header and footer for different sections in a document. The trick is to use section breaks and unlink the header and footer respectively–this allows you to set them as you are creating the document.

In Windows we have the Startup folder where we can easily place a shortcut to a program that we want to launch automatically. In Linux Mint there is a way easier way to manage startup applications–here’s how to do it.

We have shown you how to install Active Directory on your network, but it’s pointless to have a Domain Controller unless you add your machines to the Domain, so today we’re going to cover how to do that.

By default in Microsoft Word 2010, width, height, and even paper size is shown in inches. For some people this is an obscure measurement that is hardly ever used. If you’d rather display in centimeters instead, let’s take a look at how we can change the default measurement unit from inches to centimeters.